I have not stopped marvelling at the constant over-simplification of the moral contradictions that the U.S., like most other nations of the world, currently finds itself in.
You hear now and again how a myopic majority of Christians have always lulled themselves into terrible complacency regarding the true nature and extents of United States’ descent into moral self-incapacitation. And a cursory knowledge of history will reveal this.
The idea that U.S.’s problems with God stemmed from the decisions of some of its leaders and a majority of its people to subscribe to the lure of the liberal culture permitting abortion and homosexuality (as if those are the only sins of that nation) is just an ugly fallacy.
This unfortunate poor sense of self-reckoning has also been the chief reason why a number of its religious leaders keep deluding themselves with the ridiculous idea of their nation as a sort of replica of the kingdom of God on earth. I have read brother Rick Joyner in some of his prophetic bulletins likening American soldiers in Kuwait and Iraq to God’s kingdom army! Immature believers around the world innocently bought into such lies and ridiculous notions.
Any more than a casual knowledge of spiritual principles will reveal that all of the ingredients that make a natural state entity a spiritual one under the direct rule and government of God were clearly not in place even from the very inception of the United States of America. There is no such country or political entity in our world today, and neither will there be. Since the rule of David over Israel, there has never been and will never be anything like that until the return of the Lord.
Of course given the power of the revival of the Christian faith that occurred in that country, and the way in which the gospel has ridden on its economic and political influence to fan out into the rest of the world, there is no disputing the fact that God has deliberately allowed the founding of that political (not spiritual) entity to be an important centre of His divine activities on earth. But God has never suffered any of our delusions that the U.S. had been conceived as, or will ever be a spiritual entity.
Right from the start, its political rulers have been marrying ungodly practices with their belief in and service to God. So if anyone wants to know, the current condition of the U.S. had existed in its weak and natural foundations. God never imbued it with the substances of a spiritually enduring entity. Although its founding fathers had, and walked with, a modicum of the knowledge of God, the entity they founded was far from being a theocracy. It was certain to God that, although it would serve His purpose, it would eventually crumble. God was not about to build His Kingdom around the frail and faulty natural foundations of any earthly political society. But He does use a people and nations.
If for obvious reasons of space and time, we are not going to be able to catalogue the history of U.S.’s breaching of God’s ways throughout the course of its history, we can at least look for sprinklings of examples in its contemporary activities.
The basic premise of my argument is that U.S.’s moral decline did not start with and is not limited to the permission of the practices of abortion and homosexuality in the society. These are only parts of the many problems coded in that nation’s natural gene. The fact that they feel very cosy about putting a sexual pervert of a president whom several women have accused of rape, into the White House speaks to their understanding of the sin dynamic, and the general attitude towards other immoral challenges in their society. Afterall, America produces and exports pornographic materials on an industrial scale, but they hardly rail against these and make any politico-religious capital out of them. It always has to be homosexuality and abortion.
Examples of crass ungodliness permeates and exists in many of the state institutions of the United States. Take the CIA and the other arms of its secret service, all of which have been promoted and widely used by its “Christian” leaders as indispensable instruments of statecraft, as example. If many of those who have naively bought into the idea that America is God’s own country know enough about the level of atrocities these arcane and sinister institutions have been used to perpetrate around the world, including gruesome, cold-blooded murders, and the destabilisation of other nations, they will probably have a rethink in the way they evaluate America’s spiritual culture and the level to which its various leadership gets guided by the fear of God.
Apart from Hitler’s Germany, the U.S. has probably fought more unjust wars and shed more innocent blood outside its own territory either directly or by proxy, than any other nation of the earth. Vietnam, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Mozambique and Angola still bear the ugly scars of how national ego and power projection calculations by the U.S. have claimed millions of innocent people’s lives.
Also, I continue to ask our white Christian colleagues if the sins of abortion and homosexuality are necessarily worse than the sin of the subjection of fellow humans to enslavement by the forerunners of the current Republican Party politicians who purportedly are seen as the promoters of “Christian” values? That hideous practice has continued till today in the guise of racism and subtle belief in white supremacy, even by white leaders in American churches!
It is most interesting that a president currently considered by most white and a few clueless black Americans as a promoter and defender of the interests of Christianity also has the dubious distinction of being the most racist in that country’s modern history.
Racism has remained a constant feature of America’s domestic and foreign policies right under these white, “Christian” political leaders, with the subtle connivance of their church colleagues, with the exception of very negligible few.
One of the most celebrated presidents in America’s modern history is the Republican Ronald Reagan. He has continued to be cited and celebrated by U.S.’s political right-leaning church leadership as an icon of America’s power and dominance (it is interesting that they don’t usually cite him as a champion of spiritual causes, because he was none of such), while despising the likes of the more peace-loving, kinder-hearted Christian gentleman, the Democrat Jimmy Carter.
Anyone who does not play the power politics of global domination or push relentless capitalism and the other cultural practices of the white right is probably not “Christian” enough. The “god” of American cultural “Christianity” is a ruthless profit maximiser.
As U.S. President, Ronald Reagan was one of the most vicious, power-drunk, right-wing ideologues of the modern era, whose foreign policies constantly evoke memories of widespread bloodshed in South Africa, Angola, Mozambique, Afghanistan and Nicaragua, to mention a few. Reagan, along with a past British leader, Margaret Thatcher repeatedly frustrated concerted global efforts at ending more quickly the evil of apartheid in South Africa. For long, they propped up the brutally racist regimes in that country with their dubious policy of “constructive engagement” claiming dishonestly that economic sanctions would hurt the black population more. It was the same sanctions that later crippled and brought down apartheid.
A secret recording of Reagan, as California governor, calling African leaders who were delegates to a UN forum, “monkeys” was recently declassified. He was talking with the Republican president at the time, Richard Nixon of the Watergate Scandal fame. Both had solid racist credentials.
Ronald Reagan was the first to adopt the campaign political tag-line: “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.” It was all about a ruthless expansion of U.S.’s global influence through economic and military assertiveness. Donald Trump and his army of right-wing ideology-driven supporters have since adopted and transmuted it into a coded language of racial bullying. It has been turned into a brazen clamour for racial purity and ascendancy, whose underlying philosophical desire is to make America “whiter” than ever through the restoration of the cultures and privileges of Caucasians. This brand of American greatness that white church leaders share with their non-christian compatriots has no biblical contents.
It was the United States which pioneered the testing and usage of a mass genocidal weapon of war, the Atomic Bomb, effectively sparking a global arms race that for almost fifty years kept the world on a knife-edge of potential annihilation, and caused trillions of dollars that could have been utilised for human-centred causes both inside the U.S. itself and elsewhere in the world, to be pumped into stockpiling deadly land and space-based weapons. The U.S. does not even have accessible healthcare for the majority of its vulnerable population!
The United States, along with the others it instigated into the costly arms race, engaged in rather inhumane acts that reduced human lives to mere statistics while testing nuclear war devices in territories inhabited by those they thought were not proper human beings. Through the systematic destruction of much of aquatic life via poisoning with atomic substances, the widespread pollution of the environment through uncontrolled capitalist industrialism, much of the world’s natural ecology has been so distorted as to put continuing sustainability of human life in our world in unprecedented peril.
It is still a subject of animated debate in historical studies whether the U.S. would have tested their WWII hydrogen bomb on mainland Europe against the German-led axis powers rather than against the yellow race Japanese who live in far-flung Asia, and were considered racially inferior! So much for a nation under God! If all of these are not evil on the same scale as homosexuality and abortion, I wonder what they are.
Apologists for the restoration of a “Christian” America are often so passionate about condemning and getting rid of abortion and homosexuality, while continuing to be dead silent regarding other equally destructive sins, including their own deliberate election of a white president who is not just sworn to the utter erasure of the memory and achievement records of his black predecessor, but also is a champion and darling of KKK-grade white supremacist groups from around the world. They can pray fervently for a white president who would defend a foreign leader who butchered one of his own citizens recently, just because he happens to be a business partner of the president and a strong economic ally of the U.S., but took a racist exception to the emergence and rule of a non-white president, stoutly maligning and withstanding him throughout his presidency, forgetting conveniently that it was God who allowed him into power not once but twice.
God does use anyone He likes, Republican, Democrat, Liberal, Black or White to do anything He wants to do. While the so-called bible-believing conservatives of the “Christian” right did not see anything wrong in consigning the black population to the status of slaves, and turning blind eyes while they were being murdered by far-right groups like the Ku Klux Klan, right into the modern era, it took the use by God of a Democrat, J.F. Kennedy, and his successor, L.B. Johnson, who ordinarily would be considered as coming from the liberal political backgrounds, to break the satanic culture of racial segregation, and began the armed protection of black school children to schools that were exclusive to the “superior race”!
It is biblical truism that believers should never put their trusts and hopes in any natural anchor – not in the White House, not in the Judiciary or any similar carnal institutions. But is that not what the visible American Christianity all about today? Rather than concentrating their efforts in drawing on the power that flows from strict conformity with the will of God, they would rather put their hope in so much partisanship that no method is often spared in getting people into the White House and the American Supreme Court in order to be able to enforce and legislate Christian values in the society.
While for example, you have every right to seek to reverse any law that wants to preclude you from praying in school by yourself, it will be rather unfair to seek a law to impose a general obligation to pray in schools on anyone who does not share your faith. If you want anyone to pray your prayer, then introduce your God to them. If they accept, they’ll be happy to join you; if they don’t, then hold them up in prayer rather than seek a law to impose a prayer obligation on everyone. I do not even see a point in carrying a prayer badge to an environment where there are people of different faiths. Pray in your house and let your “prayer-full” self produce values that others can relate with and want to emulate. Praying in a public place does not necessarily constitute a cardinal Christian faith obligation. We are not Pharisees.
Olushina Adisa wrote in from London.